TOOL · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Ticks and Leeches

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-3 and 5-16 -- 20.3% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
152 BPM
TIME
7/4
BARS
145
LENGTH
6:37
DIFFICULTY
61/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 152 BPM
TICKS AND LEECHES · BAR 1

It is played on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 53 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how many notes a second it asks for.

The whole song is 61 out of 100, so the beat is most of what the song asks for. Get it clean and the rest follows.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 99 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 4 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 99, 117, 134 and 152 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Ticks and Leeches use?

A one-bar groove on snare, high tom, floor tom and kick, in 7/4 at 152 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 20.3% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-3 and 5-16. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 6 times over the song.

Is the beat in Ticks and Leeches hard?

53 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 61 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 145 BARS ANALYSED